Amius
Username: Picknick10 Name: Amius Age: 299 years old (280 of which he's spent in a coma) Appearance: Amius's growth is stunted by his runes. While most dragons can be quite large, Amius is only just about the size of a draft horse, if not a little bit bigger. Personality: Amius acts very much like a person still as apposed to acting like a dragon. In fact, he actually has very little idea on how a dragon is supposed to act. Having been raised by for his entire life, Amius lacks all but the instincts, behavioral intuition, and personality that most dragons have. Amius himself gets very strange and bashful at times when around actual natural born dragons. Feeling out of place, and almost like a fraud around them. At other times he lives up to his namesake of "The Guardian of Panoply." Deep inside him there's an urge to protect that prevents him from standing idle or stalling when things that really matter to him are at stake. Some might call him reckless, but he is always just doing what he thinks needs to be done. Powers: Amius breathes lightning instead of fire and has basic weather magic as one might expect from a water drake. Opinion of Humans: Fragile things - although they make good friends and have useful thumbs. Bio: “Long live the Protector!”, these were words that Amius had often heard when he was little. You see, the port city of Panoply prospered under the guardianship of a dragon. From generation to generation a single egg was laid. After centuries when the previous guardian passed or moved on, the egg would hatch and the cycle would go on anew. Amius was the next in line, newly hatched to fill the gap left by the previous guardian. Like all the previous guardians he was pampered and enjoyed all the same luxuries a prince might hope for. Whatever it was he desired, he was given it. A dragon-protected port was well worth the upkeep of feeding and providing for a dragon. Pirates hesitated to plunder ships within a radius, and merchants flocked to take advantage of the safe shipping routes. The promise of security brought a surplus of trade and investors. To wait until the previous guardian passed before hatching the next, however, was both a beneficial boon and a danger in its own. Waiting provided the opportunity to raise the next dragon with no draconic example for him to follow. This lack of natural guidance gave them what was essentially a blank canvas to mold and even brainwash as they saw fit. As a consequence of waiting though they left themselves vulnerable in the gap between the late guardian’s death, and the new one’s time spent in adolescence. A hatchling was no good for fighting off invading armies nor preventing pirate attacks. So Panoply compensated by increasing their military spending during this time, and all was well. So Amius prospered in turn, festivals were held in his honor, and scholars came to school him. He was quick to show his hunger for knowledge, and in time he became known as the ‘guardian of the library’ ever for all the time he spent in it for all his love of books. As it was things were good. Panoply got their clean slate dragon to raise and mold as they deemed necessary, and Amius got to be pampered as a prince. It seemed though the people of Panoply could not wait though. In order for the city’s trade to continue prospering, they needed their dragon guardian to grow up. So, the government mages began to experiment on him. Runes were placed on him in an attempt to magically accelerate his rate of growth, and it worked to some extent. Amius reached the size of adolescence much quicker than anyone could have anticipated. Over the course of months, rather than years, he shot up from the size of a small dog to that of a draft horse. So, they placed more runes on him again, to bring him up to meet his full potential. Unbeknownst to all but the wizard himself the runes themselves were dangerous. Having failed before, and fearing failure again he ‘borrowed’ books confiscated from cults that rose now and again, squashed over lengthy investigations and periods of times. The power was borrowed from the void, but the side effects took time to set in or become obvious. Of course he would be careful, they only had to be used for a short period of time before he would remove them. Unfortunately for Panoply - for Amius - not every problem could be solved with military might alone, or even a dragon, as young and little as he was to make a difference. It had been an unusually stormy season, and while normally this would not have been a problem, it weakened the ground the buildings sat upon. The city was well built, so this alone was not a problem, but like all disasters, usually a bunch of little things add up into one big monstrous thing. In this case, one bad thing was turned into a complete and utter disaster. Years of infrastructure had been neglected before this point. With Amius’ arrival money had been siphoned from public projects to fund his education and raising. He was an important public figure, and with that came expensive festivals, celebrations, and even a holiday to honor the city’s protector. Dragons have expensive tastes, and as spoiled as he was, it was very easy for him to drain the city's coffers over the years. It was no wonder when the biggest tsunami of the decade struck on the shores of Panoply, it ravaged the city. Standing upon weakened foundations, much of the city was swept back into the sea with the receding water, and with it, nearly half of Panoply perished. Amius was one of the countless many swept out to sea. And so, with the city in ruins, and their protector gone, Panoply was crippled. At this point Panoply was already running on loans, spending big now on their guardian with the promise that when he was fully grown trade would boom back to their usual highs and profits would once more outpace spending. There was simply no money to rebuild the city. Oh, they tried, but with their dragon gone, no one would lend any more money to the already in debt city, literally and figuratively under water. People began to abandon the city in droves. Homes, lives, and an entire way of life had been destroyed. With no signs of a speedy bounce back, and their guardian gone the city dwindled and died, a ghost town left to be reclaimed by nature. The city might have perished, but the young water dragon tasked with protecting it had not. The stone and marble buildings were far sturdier than the soil they had been built upon. Although swept out in the tsunami and claimed by the rising sea over time, many of the ornate buildings remained mostly intact. Unlike any of the other people swept away, Amius was an aquatic dragon.It was a natural quirk of his inheritance, but it did nothing to save the entirely human city. He was simply too young to make a difference, and too inexperienced to cope with the chaos going on around him. While hundreds of thousands of people drowned perished, Amius survived. Of course he didn’t survive unscathed; he was knocked out in the tsunami and badly hurt. Although he survived he fell into a stasis of sort as his body went into a forced hibernation under the trauma inflicted. For poor Amius this meant several things: the experimental runes and magic laid upon him had never meant to be long term. Although they had caused him to grow quickly at first, the strain it had placed on him had stunted and further growth, capping his size where it had been at, that of a draft horse. Furthermore, the magic began to have unpredicted side effects, etched into his scales and body over time, seeping in like acid. The runes were now permanent and their effects mostly chaotic and unknown. It also meant that Amius was forgotten. He and the city itself faded, abandoned and destined to go down in the history books as a legend. So Amius remained in slumber to protect what remained of the city despite the fact that no one remained to protect, even when he awoke many years later. He had been told he was not allowed to leave the city, and even though the city had moved, was underwater, and abandoned, he could not bring himself to leave. Instead he made the sunken remains of the library his home. Portions of it even remained dry, pockets of air trapped protecting the books even deep under the sea, and they were probably the only thing keeping Amius there still. Category:Dragons